Existentialism and Education. an Introduction to Otto Friedrich Bollnow

Existentialism and Education. An Introduction to Otto Friedrich Bollnow Ralf Korrenz (Author) Norm Friesen (Editor) 1 Table of Contents Editor’s & Translator’s Foreword 2 Author’s Preface 8 1. “What can we say with any certainty about human beings?” 10 2. From “Uncertainty” to “Deeper Understanding” 17 3. Between Lebensphilosophie and Existential Philosophy 23 Lebensphilosophie: Philosophizing “Life” Itself 23 Existential Philosophy 29 Rationality of the Irrational 37 4. Educational Reality 48 Attuned Educational Reality 49 Broken Educational Reality 58 Guided Educational Reality 70 6. Conclusions: Criticisms and Connections 80 7. Biographical Timeline 86 8. Selected Bibliography 87 9. Secondary Works Cited 89 2 Editor’s & Co-Translator’s Foreword As this book’s editor and co-translator, this foreword provides me with a valuable opportunity to contextualize my own interest in and appreciation of the work of Otto Friedrich Bollnow, and also to locate his thought in a broader conceptual context. I thus begin by discussing Bollnow’s work in terms of my own academic research and experience, and I then point out some of the more academic, conceptual aspects that connect Bollnow to important but perhaps less familiar intellectual traditions in the human sciences—including the tradition of philosophical “anthropology” prominent in this book’s title. I conclude with a brief overview of the book’s chapters and its principle themes. Otto Friedrich Bollnow and his approach to “educational realities” first became familiar to me through the work of my doctoral supervisor, Max van Manen, who translated one of Bollnow’s key texts, The Pedagogical Atmosphere (1968/1989). In this text, Bollnow describes the titular concept, the pedagogical atmosphere, as a kind of shared mood or sense of attunement: “A disposition of acceptance, [encouraging students’] making of far-reaching plans, and… hope-filled working toward their fulfillment” (1989, p. 23). Such a positive and supportive climate is understood by Bollnow in close connection with another key notion from the tradition of the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) from which Bollnow draws, and to which he contributes in significant ways. This second notion is the pedagogical relation. In my 2003 dissertation (later revised and published Peter Lang as The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen: Relational Pedagogy and Internet Technology, 2011), Bollnow’s understanding of both atmosphere and the pedagogical relation proved to be immensely productive in analyzing common experiential elements of contemporary online education. In this study, I undertook to tease out the differences between pedagogical lived experience in online and face-to-face settings. The idea of sharing an “atmosphere” or a general “climate” is one that raises many questions and uncertainties in online pedagogical contexts, particularly when the online “classroom” is constituted primarily through the non-synchronous exchange of textual posts and replies. We all know that “tone” is especially hard to assess when it comes to expressions sent and received online. In face-to-face settings, as Bollnow makes clear, such “tone” may be communicated not only in terms of non-verbal cues, but also (for example) by teachers’ and students’ passive receptivity, even their silence. A kind of pervasive “mood” can arise that is more than simply the sum of its parts or of the individuals who might experience it. Today, concerns with school and classroom “climate” are commonplace, and this could be seen as an unintended echo of Bollnow’s original and powerful account of this intangible but indispensible pedagogical phenomenon. The fact that a shared mood or climate is not nearly as palpable online is something that distance educators and advocates of online education must keep in mind. Later, I turned in my own work to experiences of “atmospheres” specifically in terms of relational, “tactful” action through which they can be carefully cultivated. I discussed “spaces” of tact and relation in an examination of online videoconferencing (2014), and more recently, in the context of the pedagogical relation itself (forthcoming). In both of these cases, Bollnow provides fresh and inventive insight into 9 a manner that involves understanding. “Hermeneutic pedagogy” is of course not the mainstream in today’s studies of education and schooling—indeed, the phrase itself is all but unused in English. However, it offers a way and means for thinking of pedagogy. It is an indispensable building block that is needed in order to avoid falling into the absolutism of measurement and optimization. It has been my great pleasure and honor that my colleague, Professor Norm Friesen, has accompanied me on the journey of translating my original German study of the hermeneutic pedagogy of Bollnow into English. Of course, real translation is never a matter of replacing one word with another. Through intensive discussion and collaboration, Norm Friesen, my assistant Sebastian Engelmann and I have endeavored to make some of the basic ideas of this pedagogical tradition comprehensible in English. In particular, Norm Friesen’s work as a Visiting Professor at Friedrich- Schiller-Universität in Jena in 2016 was instrumental in this process. I am also grateful to Diana and James MacDonald, who, years earlier, undertook a verbatim draft translation of the book. Through these experiences, I have learned that translation is a complex transfer of meaning involving omission, addition and reconstruction. Translation in this sense involves the identification of structures of meaning—of understanding—that are bound to languages in particular and multifaceted ways. It was Norm Friesen above all who undertook this difficult task. I thank him and Sebastian Engelmann for their collaboration in this regard. This English introduction to the pedagogy of Otto Friedrich Bollnow is based on a German-language book titled “Otto Friedrich Bollnow. Ein pädagogisches Portrait” (Weinheim 2004). It was important then, and it remains important today that the combination of existentialism and education presented in this book is seen as a variant of hermeneutic pedagogy. I hope that this focus on understanding itself becomes understandable in this text. - Ralf Koerrenz 10 1. “What can we say with any certainty about human beings?” The question in the title of this chapter was one that motivated Otto Friedrich Bollnow—both as a philosopher and as an educator. His answer to this question is complex. There is a paradox at the root of Bollnow’s response: human beings are defined by the very fact that their “being” cannot be narrowly defined at all. The essence of an individual is not determined by the makeup of his or her brain or even by the influences of nature and nurture. Humans are instead primarily determined by their openness to what is new and changing—in other words, by learning. As a result, an individual cannot be reduced to a singular core being that is determined by specific content (e.g., beliefs, theories, moralities). But even this conclusion would be an oversimplification, a reduction of Bollnow’s response. At this point, we should instead simply be aware of the challenge of describing humans in any single simple or definitive way. To begin any such description, one must consider the variability and variety to be found at various levels of human reality. In the context of an open inquiry into humans, these different levels need to be interpreted. Therefore, an appropriate perceptual framework is required. For our purposes here, a framework based on a notion Bollnow borrowed from one of his university professors, physicist Werner Heisenberg, will be used. This is Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle”—the idea that a fundamental limitation or “uncertainty” is necessarily a part of any knowledge or insight that one might gain from the reality around one’s self. It is in this uncertainty that one finds the individual—dealing with change, engaging in learning, and also constantly undergoing “education” in the broadest sense. The individual is simultaneously a unique creature and a social one determined by overarching social and cultural systems. The individual’s life is characterized by both consistency and unpredictability in equal measure. According to Bollnow, this mixture of consistency and unpredictability means that human beings are able to experience a kind of spatial and situational “harmony.” Emotionally, the individual is embedded in and frequently dominated by contexts of consistency or unpredictability, as well as ones of harmony. This is even true when the individual consciously represses his or her emotions, and tries to rise above his situation and context. We are speaking here on the level of human values and their subjective evaluation; a level far beyond day-to-day activities, but at the same time clearly relevant to them. These human values determine and guide the individual, but would remain nothing more than abstract intellectual forms if they were not put into practice. The central challenge and indeed the ultimate goal for human beings on a path of learning and education becomes the search for genuine balance. The examination of this and other levels of human reality lies at the foundation of Bollnow’s pedagogical perspective and his philosophy. Philosophy and pedagogy support each other in Bollnow’s work; both draw deeply from his examination of basic human realities—from what is known as his “anthropology.” Anthropology in this 11 context does not refer

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